JRank Site Search Engine

Frequently Asked Questions (a.k.a. “check here first”)

JRank is an easy-to-use “copy-and-paste” free site search engine that provides a user interface for
webmasters to control crawl schedule and which pages are/aren't crawled.

What is a context?

A context is a section of your website searched by JRank. For example, you could configure your
context to be your entire site (http://www.mysite.com), or a subdirectory of your site (e.g., http://www.mysite.com/archive/).

How do I create a context?

Login and click the "Contexts" link on the top menu bar. Next, click "Add new context…" to create a new context. Then,
enter the URL (either your home page URL, or a specific directory of your site).

How do I get JRank to index/crawl my site's contents?

Once you've created an account and created a context, copy/paste the context's HTML code into your website. Then, in your
account management screen on JRank, click the "validate" button. If the validation is successful, click the "crawl now" button
to begin crawling & indexing your site.

Remember that JRankBot finds and crawls links in your pages, starting from the "Start URL". Check your page source to make sure the
links in your site are actual, bona-fide HTML links. We see many websites that were created in visual editors like Front-Page or Dreamweaver
that use javascript and other strange link schemes to form the page navigation. Check to make sure your pages validate against an HTML
validator like the W3 Validator Service.

How do I exclude a portion of the page?

You can place the tags <!-- jrank:off --> and <!-- jrank:on --> around the text you wish to exclude from the index.

I manage several websites. Can I use JRank to manage site search for all of them?

Yes. Just create a different context for each website. This can be done with a single JRank account.

Can I use JRank to return results from multiple websites?

Yes. You can add rules to the "Advanced Matching" section in order to pass more than just the domain of the "Start URL". For example,
if you wanted to start at yourwebsite.com which links to yourotherwebsite.com, first set the "Start URL" to "http://yourwebsite.com/"
and create the advanced rules: "^http://yourwebsite\.com/" and "^http://yourotherwebsite\.com/", which would tell JRankBot to crawl
anything with URLs that start with those two patterns.

I set everything up per the instructions, but I'm not getting any search results on my site at all (or, I'm getting
partial/incomplete results). What's up with that?

Clearly, something is up with that.

First, verify that your site validated okay and the crawl completed. Next, check to make sure that your site doesn't
have any robots.txt or other rules that would prevent JRank from accessing it. Also check the Stats page on your JRank account
for a list of URLs that may have been problematic for the crawler.

If you are using regex matching rules for your context, check your expression to make sure it's correct. You might want to
try simplifying it to a plain url (and crawling again) to see if it works that way.

Failing all of this, you might want to initiate another crawl, and then wait 1-2 hours after it completes before trying more
searches. If this still doesn't work, try setting up a new context and repeating the process. If you get really stuck, you
can always contact us for assistance.